CHARACTERISTICS. 141 



I feel that there is perfect justice in the complaint he makes 

 in the conclusion of the letter. The position is pathetic, but 

 inevitable, and can only be redressed, if at all, by the testimony 

 of men like myself, who do actually, in some degree, apprehend 

 what the position of a man like Dr. Carpenter really has been 

 in scientific history, and have the opportunity of stating it. 



Dr. Carpenter, in (act, was a member of a group of men who 

 lived through a half-century of biological discovery, the like of 

 which, from the nature of things, can never be repeated. The 

 rapid development of the use of the microscope revealed a pro- 

 fusion of cardinal facts in biology in a comparatively short time. 

 The actual quantity of biological investigation will, year by year, 

 no doubt, progressively increase. But the veil of ignorance can 

 never again be lifted in the same interval from such an aggre- 

 gation of fundamental additions to knowledge, for the simple 

 reason that science can never again be occupied, as it was then, 

 at one and the same moment with the fundamental facts of every 

 branch of biological investigation. It was in this exciting 

 atmospliere that Dr. Carpenter passed the early part of his life. 

 The facts of the life-history of a fern are taught in every class 

 of elementary biology in the three kingdoms. Yet I remember 

 Dr. Carpenter telling me how he one day met a friend in the 

 street who asked him to go to the lodgings (somewhere in 



Owen's book on " Parthenogenesis " shows what a confusion he was in ; as 

 Steenstrup's "Alternation of Generations," and Edward Forbes's "Naked- 

 Eyed Medusa " had shown in regard to the reproduction of animals. In the 

 first volume of the Review (then edited by me) I had shown that the so-called 

 " alternation " is really the btiddtJts;- oi generative zooids from the nutritive 

 zooid ; and this, though contested at the time by Edward Forbes and Owen, is 

 now universally recognized. At the Oxford meeting of the British Association, 

 in 1847, at which I advanced this heresy, I was pooh-poohed ; and at the 

 Council of the Ray Society, at which I advocated the reproduction of Suminski's 

 book on the "Ferns," I was assured that the close resemblance of the 

 Antherozoids to Spermatozoa was quite sufficient proof that they could have 

 nothing to do with vegetable reproduction. 



I do not think that the men of the present generation, who have been 

 brought up in the light, quite apprehend (in this as in other matters) the utter 

 darkness in which we were then groping, or fully recognize the deserts of those 

 who helped them to what they now enjoy. 



I am not given to reclamations, and should not have troubled you with this 

 on my own account ; but Thvvaites having lieen a special "child " of mine (as 

 he always avowed), I do not like that //c" should not get full credit for his work, 



Yours faithfully, 



WiLUAM B. Carpenter. 



